Comment Cloud network-attached storage (NAS) startup ParaScale has been forced into some emergency self-surgery after failing to seal a funding round. What is happening and where is it going?

Founder and chief technology officer Cameron Bahar said: "It is true that we were not able to raise our series-B round of financing with Sajai Krishnan at the helm. We're still here and have down-sized the team to reduce our burn rate while we evaluate our options going forward."

Sajai Krishnan was replaced as CEO by Ken Fehrnstrom a couple of months or so ago.

Bahar said its current travails were neither a marketing or product problem: "Interestingly we have had a lot of interest from both enterprise and service providers for our cloud storage product and have sold product into both environments.

"Our current predicament is a financing problem and not a fundamental market/product problem."

The Register story about ParaScale this week raised questions about the logic of running applications on the storage nodes of a ParaScale cluster.

"NAS does NOT allow you to run applications directly on the data (locally) and requires shuttling of data across the network from NAS to compute servers," Bahar explained. "NAS is a closed storage appliance.

"Think of Hadoop and MapReduce applications to understand the benefits of a scale-out reliable storage platform that allows applications to run locally, providing significant performance boost to data mining and other data intensive applications such as video analytics/etc.

"Because our product provides a shared-nothing scale-out storage platform that is read/write and has NFS access, it's ideal for fast/parallel ingest of machine-generated data and processing."

We opined that there was little room in the well-developed NAS market for ParaScale. Bahar disagrees. "This is a novel and interesting use-case that our product is a great fit for besides the crowded generic NAS market. Think of a solution that allows you to persistently store, manage, and analyze unstructured data."

"We have a rock star team, and a tough situation to deal with. Wish us luck." ®